


The Gift of a Lifetime

by TippenFunkaport



Series: SPOP Canon Compliant Post-War Fics [10]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Background Catadora, Birthday, Bow's birthday, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Glimbow Centric, Happy Ending, Immortality, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Light Angst, Magic, Married Couple, Married Life, Post-Canon, Post-War, Queen Glimmer (She-Ra), Romance, Suggestive Themes, Tumblr: Glimbow Week, talk of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:36:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26370514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TippenFunkaport/pseuds/TippenFunkaport
Summary: It’s Bow’s Birthday, and the whole gang is getting together for a big party. Everyone keeps saying he doesn't look a day over 30! Problem is... he's turning 50.This is super sweet and sexy and romantic.Posted for Bow's Birthday and also for the Glimbow Week Prompt: Gifts / Celebrations
Relationships: Bow/Glimmer (She-Ra)
Series: SPOP Canon Compliant Post-War Fics [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1877971
Comments: 29
Kudos: 73
Collections: Glimbow Week 2020, Glimbow Week 2020 countdown collection





	The Gift of a Lifetime

“You goof. I told you to go to bed.”

“Wha? Oh, hey.” Bow woke on his worktable, his tracker pad stuck to his face and his wife standing over him looking tired but very excited about something. He rubbed his face with both hands, trying to get enough coherence to hold a conversation. “I didn’t want to go to bed without you. Besides, I had an upgrade I wanted to make.”

“Me too.” Glimmer practically bounced up to give him a quick kiss, bursting with something secret. Bow couldn’t help but grin. He loved seeing her happy like this. She sparkled.

“Oh, yeah?” He teased, getting up from the desk to wrap his arms around her. “Well, I hope yours went better than mine. I felt like I had a couple of hours of work in me, but I must have been more tired than I thought.”

Glimmer laughed and traced something along his cheek. “You have buttons on your face. Sorry about that.”

“It’s not like it’s your fault I fell asleep.”

She didn’t reply, just raised her eyebrows and looked away. What was she being so sneaky about tonight? He’d known Glimmer long enough to know it was usually better to just wait her out because she could never keep secrets for long, but she was acting so strangely right now the curiosity was kind of getting to him.

“So, how are you feeling?” She stared at the buttons on his shirt, tracing the surrounding stitching.

He yawned. “Like it’s time to go to bed. What were you doing so late, anyway?”

She looked up at him, her lip caught in her teeth, all mischief. It was adorable... but also slightly disconcerting considering how much trouble Glimmer could get into when she put her mind to it. In a pink flash, they were back up in their bedroom, but she didn’t move from within his arms even after she’d finished teleporting them.

“Oh, just a complicated spell and I needed the moons lined up just right...” She waved her hand vaguely and stifled a yawn. “Boring sorcery stuff.”

Now that he looked at her, there were faint shadows under her eyes. She looked a little pale too. If the angel blood she’d inherited from her mom didn’t keep her from ever getting sick, he’d have assumed she was coming down with something. As it was, she probably just overdid it.

“It must have been pretty intense. You look exhausted.”

“Well, that’s because it’s after midnight! Which means...” She grabbed his shirt with both hands. Another flash and he landed on his back on their bed with her on top of him, looking sneakier than ever. “It’s your birthday!”

“Ha! So it is. I’m officially thirty, huh?”

“Happy birthday, Bow!” She leaned down and kissed him again, this time for long enough that he had a strong suspicion they weren’t actually going to sleep just yet. Not that he was complaining. He was just sliding his hands up into her hair when she suddenly broke the kiss off and looked at him. “So, I’ve got something to give you.”

“Oh, yeah? What is it?” He kissed gently along her neck. She made a little happy sighing sound that was music to his ears.

She leaned down and whispered in his ear. “It’s a secret. Something special. I guess you could say, the gift of a lifetime.”

Was this what she was being so evasive about? Then she gently nipped his earlobe, and he decided it was time to figure out how to remove whatever Queenly romper situation she was wearing today. “Well, maybe you can save it for later? Because there’s only one thing I’m interested in unwrapping right now.”

She laughed and then they were kissing again and he lost himself in her smell, warm and familiar, addicted to the spicy sweet way she tasted. He knew her body as well as his own, what she wanted, needed. And she knew him just the same. Friends who’d become lovers and understood each other inside and out. She made his whole life sparkle in ways that had nothing to do with magic. And this was all he ever wanted.

He forgot all about everything but how he could do this forever.

It was almost an hour later when they were lying tangled up together under the covers, their clothes who knew where, and Bow was feeling perfectly contented. So far, his third decade was off to an incredible start. Glimmer had tucked into his side right where he liked her to be and he nuzzled down into her hair, breathing in her scent. He’d almost fallen asleep when she spoke in a voice barely above a whisper.

“Bow?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you remember when we first go together? After the war?” She was tracing a heart against his bare chest, a familiar habit that made him smile. “You said if we were going to do this, you and I, it would be for forever.”

“I remember.” He remembered the moment exactly. It felt like it was simultaneously yesterday and a whole lifetime ago.

She propped herself until he could see in her face. In the moonlight from their bedroom window, she looked worried, her eyes shining like she was about to cry. “Do you still feel that way?”

He stroked her hair and leaned up to kiss her. “Of course I do. As long as I’ve got, I want to spend with you.”

“OK.” She exhaled with something like relief. “I love you. I love you so much. I don’t know what I would do without you.”

“Well, I’m not going anywhere. And I love you too.”

She nestled into his side again. He was almost asleep when he heard her whisper.

“Happy Birthday, Bow.”

* * *

“Happy Birthday, Bow!”

“Thanks, buddy!” Bow laughed as Sea Hawk pulled him into a tight hug. His mop of hair may be streaked with gray these days, but the old sea dog was still pretty strong. “I’m so glad you and Mermista could come.”

“Wouldn’t miss it! Never miss a chance to party with my old crew. And I hear tonight’s festivities are to be particularly spectacular!”

“Yeah, Castaspella went a little overboard but apparently turning 50 is a big deal. But the whole gang will be here and most of the kids too, so it should be a good time.”

“Fifty?” Sea Hawk held him at arm’s length and examined him. There were more lines around his eyes than Bow remembered from the last time. “Well, my good man, being King agrees with you. You don’t look a day over thirty!”

Bow colored. This was like the fourth time one of their friends had made a comment like that today alone, and he wasn’t sure how to take it. “Let me help you with your stuff.”

“Ah, yes. Much appreciated! These old joints aren’t what they used to be!” Sea Hawk said, clapping him on the back.

He got the rulers of Salineas settled into their guest suite, then joined the whole brood from Plumeria in an impromptu game of ice ball in the courtyard before Castaspella shooed him upstairs so she could set-up for the party. He ran into Adora and Catra on the way upstairs, the two of them play fighting over which one of them was the bigger MILF. They asked him to weigh in with a vote, and he tactfully pretended Castaspella was looking for them and made a quick escape to his bedroom.

He chuckled as he started to get undressed. He loved when they all got together like this. All this life behind them, kids and battles and chaos, and in so many ways it still felt like nothing had changed.

He hadn’t seen his own MILF since this morning, but there was one nearly foolproof way of getting her to appear. Sure enough, he’d barely turned the water on and wet his hair before he heard the familiar sound of someone teleporting in to join him. And while he still didn’t quite buy Glimmer’s argument that showering together wasted less water — How if they stayed in there twice as long? — he was in just about a perfect mood when they did eventually emerge to get ready for the party.

“So this is what I thought we’d wear tonight.” Glimmer gestured to the outfits she’d laid out on their bed. She was only wearing a towel wrapped around her and her hair was the usual pink squid it turned into whenever it got wet, but she was still somehow the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. “But you can wear whatever you want, it’s your birthday!”

“This is fine. I like when we match. It’s our thing.” All this time and she was still his favorite person. He wrapped his arms around her from behind and kissed the damp skin between her tiny wings.

She giggled and squirmed away. “Don’t start that again or we’ll never get ready in time.”

“Hey! I was just innocently showering, you’re the one who—“

She spun around and kissed him which he knew she was only doing to shut him up but he didn’t mind at all. “Go get dressed, birthday boy. The kids will be coming any minute. And Adora wants us to take some pictures before everyone else gets here, just the Best Friend Squad and assorted offspring.”

She grabbed her gown and disappeared between her dressing screen while Bow put his own suit on. He examined himself in the mirror. Lookin’ good!

But he couldn’t help but think about what Sea Hawk had said earlier. Because they were all getting older. Everyone they knew seemed to move a little slower these days.

Except for them.

Thing was, when he really looked at himself, he kind of had to admit that his friends were right. He really didn’t look a day over thirty. Which should be a good thing, right? His dads had aged gracefully, right until the end. It could just be good genes. The problem was, he was starting to suspect it wasn’t his genes.

“How do I look?” Glimmer teleported out from behind her dressing screen and did a twirl. Her gown flounced out around her in a shimmer of silk. It was still amazing how you could know someone for so long and still love them so much it felt like you’d burst when you look at them.

“Amazing.” Like an angel, but he didn’t say that part out loud. The angel thing was a dangerous topic. In part because he didn’t want her to think she was telling her she looked like her mom, which was dangerous territory no matter how pretty your wife’s mom was, but also because of the specter of Angella’s immortality.

Her father and aunt seemed to think being half-angel meant Glimmer would be immortal or close enough to it, and this revelation early in their relationship had sent Glimmer into a panic. It had been a flurry of research and magic tests, trying to figure out if she really was near-immortal and, if so, how much longer a life did that mean? From Bow’s perspective, it had been a horrible time. Night after terrible night of holding her while she cried herself to sleep imagining herself all alone watching everyone she loved dying around her. The weird guilt of feeling like he was letting her down by being a person who could grow old and die.

And then, one day, she’d just stopped talking about it. And Bow had been so grateful that she’d made her peace, he hadn’t really thought to question why or how she’d so suddenly come to terms with the existential crisis that had tormented her for so long. But he thought of it now as he watched her clasp her jewel around her neck.

Thing was, Glimmer didn’t look a day over thirty either.

She finished at her vanity and turned to see him watching her. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“When was the last time I had a cold? I haven’t really thought about it, but it’s been years. Decades.”

“I don’t know. Am I supposed to be keeping track of these things?” She ducked back behind her screen and emerged with shoes. Her tone was casual, but he’d known her for his entire life.

“Glimmer.”

“What?” She snapped at him and looked like she was half a second away from crying.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“I tell you everything! I haven’t had a secret from you since I was six years old!” She had her hands on her hips, defensive. But she wouldn’t look at him.

Bow sat down on the edge of the bed, a million little things suddenly linking up into a pattern he can’t believe he didn’t notice. They stayed like that for a long time in tense silence until he finally put into words an idea that had seemed impossible until a few minutes ago. 

“I’m not aging. At least not normally.” He stared at his hands in his lap, not wrinkled and spotted like his dads’ hands had been at fifty but the same hands he’d had his whole life. When Glimmer said nothing, he looked up at her. She was watching him, looking about half a second away from either crying or exploding. And he didn’t want to accuse her, especially when he didn’t even know what he was accusing her of. But if he wasn’t getting older, there was only one reason that could be. Magic.

“Glimmer?”

She crossed her arms and gave him the same pout he’d been on the other end of for decades. “Promise not to be mad.”

“How can I possibly promise that if I don’t know what it is? You did something, didn’t you? Something to me. Without even asking!” That flurry of research and panic from the early days of their marriage. Why hadn’t it ever seemed weird to him before that it had just stopped like that? “Please, talk to me!”

She exhaled, letting her arms fall to her side. She swept over and sat down next to him on the bed. She was crying and for the first time he didn’t want to immediately wrap his arm around her. They were only a few inches apart, but it felt like miles right now.

She wiped at her eye, her voice barely above a whisper. “We did some tests, magic ones, Aunt Casta and I. Because I wanted to know, you know? My mom had centuries, would have had centuries more if… and I needed to understand, was I looking at a couple extra decades or thousands of years without...”

She hiccuped a small sob and Bow closed the distance between them and put his arm around her. He stroked her arm, and she leaned into him.

“And what did you find?”

Glimmer was twisting her hands in her lap. “I’m not immortal. Not like my mom, anyway. But I have enough angel blood in me I had... extra. Enough for four or five normal lifetimes, maybe more.” She turned, so she was looking up at him, her face wet with tears. “Bow, I don’t want to live even one lifetime without you, let alone five! What was I supposed to do, just let you get old and die while the kids and I all keep going for years and years? It’s stupid.”

Bow exhaled. They’d talked about this when the immortality thing first came up. Talked about how he’d made peace with his own mortality, how he didn’t want her to worry about him, how nothing would help him rest in peace more than knowing she was still out there living happily but those arguments hadn’t worked then and he didn’t see why they’d work now. “What did you do?”

“It was too much! Way too much life for one person!”

“Glimmer...”

“You said if we were going to do this, we were going to do it forever. As long as you’ve got, we’d spend together. YOU said that.”

“Please, just tell me.”

She let out a long puff of breath. “Do you remember your thirtieth birthday? I told you I was going to give you something.”

Thirtieth. He tried to remember which one that had been. There had been a lot of birthdays and after a while they all kind of blended together. Then he remembered something, a ghost of a memory that clicked everything into place.

“You said you were going to give me… the gift of a lifetime. Oh, gods, what did you do?”

“Exactly what I told you. Gave you a lifetime. Mine.”

“What?” He grabbed her arms and stared at her.

“I split it. Half and half. So we can share it, you see? As long as I’ve got, you’ve got too. So neither of us has to go. Or be left alone.” She was giving him this look that he knew way too well, the one that had roped him into all sorts of mischief since they were kids. A face that would always rather beg forgiveness than ask permission. “As long as you’ve got, right? Well, now you’ve got longer!”

Bow let go of her arms and fell back onto the bed. He stared up at the ceiling and tried to absorb the enormity of what she’d just told him. Near immortality. That would mean all five decades he’d lived through already were only a fraction of the time he had left to go. He suddenly had a much better understanding of what Glimmer had been going through all those dark nights, days stretching ahead of her.

But she hadn’t cried then because she might live forever. She’d cried because she’d be alone. And he wouldn’t be.

Glimmer and the kids, they all had that same angel blood. He was the only mere mortal here with a looming expiration date. And if the kids had started out with a quarter and she’d halved hers, then they were all about even. There had always been this kind of ugly part of him he never wanted to look too closely at that hated the idea that Glimmer might replace him after he was gone with someone who wouldn’t love her as much as she deserved. But if he never had to go, if they could just stay like this for a couple of lifetimes... was that so bad?

“Please don’t be mad at me.” She was sitting with her back to him and he could see her little wings over the back of her dress rise and fall with silent sobs. “All the princesses have longer than normal lives. Being She-Ra buys Adora years every time she transforms. Catra’s got nine lives she’s already reset half a dozen times. Entrapta clones her and Hordak a new body every decade. And I’m supposed to just let you get old and die way before the rest of us because of, what, the principle of the thing? What’s the point of all this magic if I can’t…”

She buried her face in her hands. He sat up and took her in his arms.

“I’m not mad. I promise. I need a little time to get my head around it, but everything you’re saying makes sense. It just would have been nice if you had at least asked me first.”

She collapsed into him and made a kind of relieved sob. “But you know I don’t do that. I just grab you and take you with me.”

He laughed because, yup, that was what she did. Grabbed him and whisked him away in a puff of magic. And jarring though it may be to be suddenly dragged along on some new adventure, didn’t he always want to be where she was? Even if this time the place she was taking him was off into near forever.

She emerged from his chest and tutted when she saw she’d soaked it with her tears. She drew a quick rune and half a second later he was clean and pressed again. She could probably have done the same on her face, but she opted for a tissue instead.

He cupped her face in his hands. “I love you.”

“Well, good, because you’re stuck with me for a really long time.” She gave him a peck on the lips. He leaned down into her, kissing her properly. She made a little happy sigh as they fell backwards onto the bed, still attached, his hand sliding against the soft material of her dress. “Oh, Bow. I love you so much. And I didn’t want to lose you. I’m sorry I didn’t ask you first.”

“It’s OK.” He was making his way down her neck, moving her necklace so his lips could reach more interesting places. “We’ve got a lot of time for you to make it up to me.”

She made a soft little moan, her fingers digging into his back. “You know, at your age, you probably wouldn’t be able to go again this soon if I hadn’t—”

This time he was the one kissing her to shut her up and he felt her laugh against his mouth. Her hands slid underneath his suit jacket and she’d almost pulled it halfway off when she stopped abruptly. “Wait a minute! Your party!”

“Eh, we can be a little bit late. It’s just a birthday party.” He nipped at her lower lip and she made an impatient sound and went back to tugging off his suit jacket. “Apparently I’m going to be having a lot of them.”

**Author's Note:**

> So a lot of my fellow Glimmer fans have some freaking SAD headcanons about Glimmer and her angel blood / immortality or near immortality and they were bringing me down so this is my take. I call it, FINE, Glimmer is near immortal but it's not sad, damn it!
> 
> Comments are always hugely appreciated no matter how long after posting it is!
> 
> Visit my Tumblr for asks, fic updates and misc thoughts. [https://tippenfunkaport.tumblr.com](https://tippenfunkaport.tumblr.com/)


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